by S. A. Sidor
“No, you and I will need help.”
“And we have no money. I spent it all, as you said. When I discovered the mummies the first time, on my own, I might add.”
She was nodding. “I recall a foreman and diggers helping.”
“You are correct. I will never forget them. But every Egyptologist has his diggers. I orchestrated things. The entire operation was under me.”
Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “You had a map as well.”
“I must remember to thank the phantom when I see him. Maybe I can ask him to draw me a map to find some money too.” I pantomimed the action of map drawing and nearly knocked the candle over with my gesticulations. My clumsiness charmed Evangeline more than my words had.
“I can get money, silly,” she said. “We have lots of money. If it’s wisely put to use–”
“The two of us together? That’s the concept, is it?”
“And Yong Wu. I think it’s appropriate that we invite him to join us.”
I was pacing, though given the confines, it was not easy.
“Oh, splendid. We’ll have a little partnership. A consortium.”
(Evangeline smiling in the darkness – fetching, frightening, maddening–)
I said, “My partners of late – the foreman and diggers you mentioned, as well as the Pinkertons – have had a tendency to die. Not too peacefully either, as you might have noticed.”
I told her everything that had happened to me from the time I accepted her father’s offer to lead an Egyptian expedition until the moment she entered my train car. Much of this information was not included in my letters to Waterston. I presumed it would deter her.
It did not.
“I’ll take care of myself. I’m not your responsibility any more than you are mine.”
I considered this arrangement.
“I am uncertain whether that makes me feel any better about things.”
“It’s a deal then?” She reached out and actually shook my hand.
A deal it was.
18
The Pit Discovery
Evangeline was right. In the morning, the mummies were gone. Crates and all. Our private car was empty. How the necrófagos took them, I cannot explain. I saw no wagon wheel tracks, only hoof prints stamped in the sand. The trail headed south through the desert and beyond to the borderland and Mexico. It was like the diggers in the tomb moving a sarcophagus they never should have been able to budge. Physics did not apply. Ever since I entered the skull rock, impossible things suddenly seemed possible. It made my head throb. I cinched the cord of my newly acquired, thoroughly stinking, yet functional sombrero under my chin and soldiered on. In the refreshments cabinet of the railcar I found a pitcher filled with water and a cut crystal glass. I poured, swallowed a few sips, emptied the remainder into my canteen, and slung it over my shoulder. Warm as bathwater, but no drink has ever tasted sweeter on my tongue – its weight gave me some comfort. The necrófagos left my pipe and tobacco unmolested which added to the mood of positivity. So too the bottle of absinthe, a flash of gemmy green as I held it up to the sun for inspection, before stowing it in my satchel along with my field notes from Egypt. I turned, searching for anything else salvageable. The floor looked awfully damned big without the coffin boxes sitting there. Even though I was starting to entertain evil feelings toward the mummies, it made my heart ache to see them stolen by those good-for-nothing dead-eaters. The mummies might be cursed, I was willing to admit, but they were our cursed mummies.
Finished, I stepped out into the Arizona blaze.
Evangeline and Yong Wu were not pleased with me and I was eager to make amends.
I had started the day being stubbornly insistent regarding the identity of Yong Wu’s companions. They were gone now, vanished before dawn. Evangeline and I had not seen so much as their shadows playing on the cave wall. And, despite the mystery, we were told nothing more about them. That did not satisfy me one bit. I wanted answers.
I began friendly enough.
“Yong Wu, I’d like to know to whom we owe our gratitude for freeing us, besides you, of course.” Here I smiled at him.
The boy glanced up at me as we walked together, but he quickly looked away.
“Are they friends of yours?” I tried to lead him. “Maybe fellow employees of the railroad?”
No look this time. His pace quickened. Mine did too.
“They are Chinese. We deduced that much from hearing you talk…”
He stopped and turned his face sharply away from me. I looked in the same direction. His eyes pointed back to hills, to the caves where we had hidden from the robbers. Dry, rough country: cacti standing like so many frozen sentinels in this place where nothing worthy of any protection grew; a black putty of shadows spread between the rocks. He started walking again.
“They had to come from the train. I mean, I suppose they were on the train before we were hijacked. They certainly weren’t living out here in this wasteland. Let’s see now. Chinese and on the train, and I recall their clothes smelled like coal dust. So my guess is they worked in the coal car stoking the engine. You get muscles shoveling coal all day, and the one who grabbed me was strong as an ox, but I cannot understand the absurd hopping. It was… inhuman.”
The boy sped up, but my legs were longer. I stepped into his path and seized him by the shoulders. Bending, I leaned my face down into his, eyeball to eyeball.
“Who are they?”
Pale streaks cleared the dirt smudged on his cheeks. He was crying.
I released him.
“Hardy.”
Evangeline had caught up with us.
Lips pursed, and her stern brow was fixed as a bayonet. She aimed herself at me.
“Why can’t he tell us who they are?” I had hoped she would take my side and help to convince the boy to explain what had happened. She was not cooperating.
My examination grew more heated.
“Maybe the reason Yong Wu escaped was that he knew the necrófagos. Even knew of their plans to overtake us. Maybe his two friends are necrófagos. Maybe this is all some ghastly game they’re playing and we’re going to end up just as dead and eaten by scavengers as those poor souls who remained on the train. Maybe he stays quiet because he’s guilty of spying for the enemy. I know one thing about your hopping Chinese friends, my unforthcoming Wu. I know they smelled like a pair of moldy old corpses.”
“Enough, Hardy! Stop!”
The boy was shaking. His body jerked with terrible little spasms as he cried harder – his nose ran and he wiped it with the tattered edge of his shirt. He opened his mouth to gasp air and let out a loud, shuddering, wet sob. His face contorted into a distressing woeful grimace.
Feeling pity I reached out to him, and he lurched to get away.
“They’re not necrófagos! They’re not!” he shouted.
Evangeline went straight to him. I was surprised to see how easily he welcomed her embrace. Just folded into her arms as if he were falling forward, all his tension dissolved against her softness. That gentle collision seemed to soothe his pain.
“Hush. Mr Hardy does not know what he said. If he knew, he would not have said it.”
She looked at me and raised a prompting eyebrow.
Well, I did not mean it. I did not even know what I did not mean. So there was no lie. Awful stirrings of regret for my harsh behavior toward the child suddenly arose. The trauma of our predicament had begun to turn me into someone I did not recognize, or very much like.
“She’s right. I don’t know what I’m saying.” The truth – I spoke the truth.
Twin silences answered me.
I followed my solitary shadow to the railcar to search for supplies.
It was then in a spirit of repair that I returned from the confinement of the railcar with my full sloshing canteen, hoping to return to the good graces of my companions. I did not locate them straightaway in the heat-wavering tan-on-beige horizon. A cold jolt of fear passed through me. But there the
y were tucked around behind the car: Evangeline squatting near the prone body of Detective Kittle and Yong Wu chasing several turkey vultures away from Thomas the porter’s corpse.
“I have good news,” I said, and shook the canteen. “Water, the elixir of life. Come join me in the shade under the train’s rear awning.”
Evangeline accepted the drink wordlessly. Her throat being parched, I did not blame her. She had been attempting to remove Kittle’s shoes; his feet had swollen grossly in the heat, stretching the leather past its limits. Picking at the tight laces, she’d broken two fingernails and they were oozing blood. Her face colored a deep unwholesome pink from exposure to the sun.
She tilted her head back swallowing and swallowing water.
“Easy there. We’ve got to make this last.”
She handed back the canteen and sucked on her injured fingertips. Sliding her fingers out momentarily, she said, “We need footwear or we’re as good as dead.”
I nodded. I had been trying not to think about my blistered feet or how the necrófagos had ridden off with my stolen shoes. The injury doubled with the indignity.
“Wu,” I called out. “Stop chasing and have a drink with us.”
But the boy did not come. He kept after the hunched, black birds, which would flap a few feet over his head, just out of reach, and drop down behind him to grab some more of Thomas.
“Calm down, boy. I know you cared for your old friend, and he for you. I think wherever he may be in the spirit world he wouldn’t want you running yourself to death for those feathered fiends. I’ll take his body and close it in the railcar. They will harass him no more.”
So, he had been hearing me, because the aerial battle ended. The birds advanced. The boy came over to us.
“Evangeline has water. But watch she doesn’t drink it all. The same goes for you.”
Yong Wu went to his spot in the shade, and I dragged the murdered porter away.
I couldn’t leave my bodyguards, Kittle and Staves, rotting in the elements, could I? So I laid them all three, side-by-side, in a row on the floor of the private car where yesterday the coffins had been stacked. “If there is a God, may he take better care of your souls than the world has done with your bodies,” I said before shutting the doors. I was not sure if any of the men believed in God, but I assumed at least one or two of them did, nor did I know how to bless them on their journey – I drew an invisible cross in the air, bowed my head and hoped for the best.
Before my prayer, but after a sweaty bit of tugging, I had succeeded in separating Staves from his boots and Kittle from his shoes. Staves’ boots were a decent fit, if longish in the toe and a bit pointy-ended for my taste. Kittle, having a surprisingly dainty foot for a policeman, made a nearly perfect match for Evangeline. Testing my boots, and pondering how the Apache went about his errands in this wilderness without a cobbler, I strode over to the pit where so many had died yesterday.
Here the rocks below told me of another surprise.
“Evangeline, have a look.” I walked to the rim of the hole. “This catastrophe is the result of a collapse and was not caused by any dynamiting. We were wrong to assume so.”
“How does one decipher that, Hardy?”
“The ends of the rails are neither twisted nor blown apart. Rather they were bent downward until they snapped from their own weight. Clearly, this was a cave-in, and a deliberate one, to be sure. Look at the walls of the pit. The earth has been hollowed out from underneath.”
Evangeline kneeled, craning her neck for a better, if skeptical, view.
I was too excited to stay in place and jogged around the bowl of sunken ground.
An excavated passage extended in two directions away from the pit. I pointed at the matched openings. “North and… slight angle turning… due south. Someone dug in this way and went out that way, or vice versa. But I’d bet on south for the destination. I would be willing to wager this is how they took the mummies. Underground, by way of that tunnel. No wagon tracks because… no wagon. Ha-ha! No mystery after all.”
At the pit’s bottom lay the mangled train on its side.
Windows dripped broken glass. A pall of dust, mixed with gray smoke, hung over the entirety of the disaster. Most eerie was the stillness. No bodies showed amid the debris, but death’s putrid breath fumed in our faces. The vultures whirled and began dropping onto the wreckage. I watched as bird after red bald-headed bird disappeared inside the silent carriages.
“What do you say to my theory, Evangeline? Pretty observant on my part…”
But when I looked over to where she had been kneeling, she was gone.
“Evangeline?”
A shifting of sand, tumbling of loose stones…
“Here, Hardy! Down here!”
I peered intently through the mantle of haze, and with dismay I spotted Evangeline – a splash of pastel skirts – moving along the length of tipped railcars as if on a garden path.
Her hand was flapping at either me or the vultures.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
“I want to get closer. To see if you’re right. Does the hole go on like you say, or not?”
“Climb out now!”
“No, I’m fine. Wait for me up there if you’re worried. I won’t be but a minute or two.”
As soon as she spoke the locomotive let out a bovine moan. A shrieking teakettle whistle followed this sour bass note, so that they sang together. Billowy, raw steam ejected out of the front-most car. What little I could spy of Evangeline cottoned over with fouled whiteness.
“I fear she’s unstable and could explode any moment!” I shouted.
Yong Wu, who had crawled up beside me at the mouth of the pit, cocked his head, wondering whether my observation described the train or the woman.
“Come up, come up, come up…” I mumbled as I tried willing her back.
Evangeline remained unseen and unheard from.
But it must be loud in the pit, I told myself. She can’t hear anything. Or she might have taken a wrong step and hit her head, or toppled into a vise-like jumble of wood and sharp hot metal within the crushed hulk, or maybe there was a clever necrófago crouching in the dark, grinning, half-sated and freshly awakened… I said these things to myself too, although it did not sound like me saying them but someone more imaginative than I was, and more anxious.
“I suppose one of us should go after her, Yong Wu.”
He lay on his belly trying to catch sight of her.
He’s a boy, only a boy, this is your task, Rom, the worried voice said.
“I will go. You stay here, at the very edge, in case I need your assistance.”
Wu’s vigorous nodding met my offer. “The birds will fly away if the boiler’s going to blow,” he said. “They are most sensitive to little changes.”
“I sincerely hope you are correct.”
With that I lowered myself, boots first, into the hellish crater.
Unbreathable. I almost went up before I had even climbed low enough to consider myself down in the wreckage proper. My eyes watered, shut of their own accord, so I was a blind man stumbling inside a puzzle box of what was formerly a train, now a deathtrap. Below the steamy fog, I could see and breathe, but I did not see Evangeline. I had been right about the noise. The shrieking deafened me. What a meal it must have been for the vultures to stay inside those cars. I did not want to encounter any of the dead. Though I had not killed them, in a way my mummies did. I was now convinced that we were the target of the necrófagos and the train might have passed safely to California if we were not aboard. Also, though the ancient dead are my obsession, the freshly dead cannot help but haunt the mind. I had had enough attending to my three executed friends in their train car. My stomach roared at the thought of coming upon more.
I walked alone, gladly.
I did not call out for Evangeline – she would not have heard me in the din.
What I did was look, look, look.
I found her in the souther
n tunnel. She’d fashioned a torch from a sun parasol (I know not how she did this, but it was crimson bright and dangerous seeming), and she was waving it about, bits of flaming fabric falling here and floating there, in her attempt to learn the secrets of the recess.
I approached her from behind. She spun on me with her fiery stick.
“So you did follow me,” she said, sounding pleased. By some acoustic mystery, the tunnel was less noisy than the pit. We could hear each other without shouting.
“I would not venture here for any other reason.”
“Then you would have missed this.” She took her flambeau off me and raised it to illuminate the passage, which was large enough and profound enough to consume all the light she offered and give back pitch darkness in abundance. It was cooler underground despite the steam. A gentle breeze was blowing at us, tilting the sputtering parasol flame backward like a flag. What could’ve dug this manner of hole? But I knew. Didn’t I? I had kicked such a creature in the face the last time I saw one, but one not nearly capable of these proportions. The smell was the same, the oiliness hanging in the air like a foul miasma.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked.
“Yes, actually, I have. Though the retreat I explored was a hundredth of this size.”
“What is it then?”
“Worm lair.”
“Worm lair,” she said. The chill running through her was contagious, for I felt it.
“El Gusano is,” I began, “a worm who can take on semi-human form as we observed him. But, naturally, or perhaps better stated, supernaturally, he’s this other thing too… this monster.” The bandit leader had admitted as much to me, mentioning his nephew at the skull rock. Gusanito. Little worm. Well, what did that make him? I finished my tidy summary, “The occult is at play here. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Oh, but I do.” She twirled the smoking parasol and tossed its blackened bones away.
“You do?”
I was astonished at her readiness to believe. It was not naiveté, quite the contrary. I had the distinct feeling that Evangeline had seen much strangeness in her short life, and although she was not yet jaded, she was prepared to admit that anything, anything at all under the sun was… and is… possible.
